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The Museum’s Collections document the fate of Holocaust victims, survivors, rescuers, liberators, and others through artifacts, documents, photos, films, books, personal stories, and more. Search below to view digital records and find material that you can access at our library and at the Shapell Center.

Angela Gogolin holds a name card intended to help any of her surviving family members locate her at the Kloster Indersdorf DP camp. This photograph was published in newspapers to facilitate reuniting the family.

Photograph | Photograph Number: 86741

Angela Gogolin holds a name card intended to help any of her surviving family members locate her at the Kloster Indersdorf DP camp. This photograph was published in newspapers to facilitate reuniting the family.

The Kloster Indersdorf children's center was established by UNRRA to shelter and rehabilitate the thousands of non-German children who were left homeless after the war. With the aid of the American Army, UNRRA Team 182 secured a cloister, Kloster Indersdorf, to serve as a center for these orphaned children. The UNRRA workers were helped in setting up the center by local nuns, who had operated an orphanage at the cloister in the interwar period. Once it was established, Kloster Indersdorf maintained a population of some 350 children, representing over twenty nationalities. Many were children who had been kidnapped by the Nazis from their homes in eastern Europe and brought to the Reich for Aryanization or for forced labor. Many had had their names changed so that they no longer knew their real identities. Some of the older children had even been made to serve in the German home guard [Volkssturm] in the last year of the war. In addition to providing basic care and social rehabilitation for the orphans, the UNRRA team helped to trace the identities of the children and to arrange for their adoption, their return to their homelands, or their emigration to new countries of settlement. The UNRRA team was assisted in providing services by a local order of Catholic nuns. From 1945 until the summer of 1946, Kloster Indersdorf operated as an international children's center, with a Jewish population of between 40-70. Most of the Jewish male youth were concentration camp survivors, particularly from Flossenbuerg. In August 1946 the center became an exclusively Jewish children's home and work kibbutz and remained so until its closing in September 1948.

Angela Gogolin was born on June 24 in 1933 in Chorzow, to Edmund and Rosa (nee Grunert). She came to Germany with her teacher and other school girls from Upper Silesia escaping from the Russian army. She was sent to Switzerland in December 1945.

Learn about over 1,000 camps and ghettos in Volume I and II of this encyclopedia, which are available as a free PDF download. This reference provides text, photographs, charts, maps, and extensive indexes.